> > > I'm not a DBA, just trying to help one out. We don't use rman much,> and generally rely on cold backups. I know, everywhere else people> seem to use RMAN, our DBA's are slow like that :)> > As a sysadmin I'm not big on raw volumes but unfortunately our standards> are pretty loose in this area.> >

>>Bear in mind that ASM is a good deal more than 'friendly raw'. The data
>>redundancy features alone are worth having in my book.

> > > Yeah, from what I can see...ASM has a lot of nice features but everything> we have goes on EMC DMX's and Veritas also offers similar solutions.> > At least, from what I can see (hence my posting).

There is a lot of value in ASM. Balancing i/o load when new volumes are
added or volumes are removed being you should consider: Veritas can't
touch it.

But our DBAs should be using RMAN and if they are not management should
consider finding some new DBAs.